With the news today that Eric Holder has told Kentucky’s U.S. Sen. Rand Paul that President Obama “has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial,” it is now apparent that this man is criminally out of control, and a menace to society. This chilling, outrageous, tyrannical assertion of power comes on top of a stunning assertion that he himself is entirely above the law giving Congress the power to oversee federal agencies and to enforce said power — which derives directly from the Constitution — via the ability to hold scofflaws officially in contempt. Here’s what he said about the members of an elected, co-equal branch of government, when they held him in contempt: “ I have to tell you that for me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted in that way,” Holder told ABC News. “And I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me.” Note that the contempt vote against Holder was not just a partisan exercise: Seventeen Democrats also voted to hold him in contempt, for his refusal to share information (and for prevaricating) about the murderous “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. This is lawlessness upon lawlessness upon lawlessness — from a thoroughly mendacious man who already was running a lawless department. The list of Holder’s outrages through the years is so long as to defy belief… but today’s letter to Rand Paul is by far the most frightening, most despicable chapter in Holder’s reign of proto-criminality.

In his letter, this Attorney Generally Hideous wrote that he can indeed imagine a scenario in which “it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” This would trample over all tradition, over due process, and also almost certainly over the Posse Comitatus Act.

This man — and probably his boss, the president, if Mr. Obama agrees with Mr. Holder — is a menace to society. One wonders whether now, finally, the civil liberties-left — in Congress, and in the establishment media — will finally hold Holder to something approaching the standard they held George Bush when Bush merely wanted to use enhanced — barely enhanced — interrogation techniques on foreign enemy combatants.

If the chief law enforcement officer of the land actually believes in such raw tyranny, we are all in danger.